The pitiless hardliners in charge of Israel's government are having none of it. Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza. By engaging in collective punishment, it is in violation of the Fourth Geneva Accord of 1949.

The sadistic war crimes that the Israelis are committing in the Gaza Strip (population 1.7 million) have taken more than 1,400 Gazans' lives—most of them civilians--and wounded some 7,000 as of this writing (August 1).

Israel, on the other hand, has suffered 60 deaths among its soldiers and only three civilian deaths, thanks primarily to the effectiveness of the "Iron Dome" anti-missile defense system that the United States and Israel created in tandem.

The Geneva Conventions were conceived and codified in the wake of the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals following World War II.

War crimes in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention can represent "a direct step"

to the classification of genocide itself in international law. Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has condemned Israel's disproportionate military assault as "outrageous."

White House Press Secretary Josh Ernest has called the civilian death and injury toll among Palestinians in Gaza "totally unacceptable" and "totally indefensible."

In spite of the sickening asymmetry of the militant forces at work in Gaza—Hamas vs. the Israeli Defense Forces—the Senate has unanimously passed a resolution in support of Israel.

David Miliband, president and CEO of the International Rescue Society (active in the West Bank) has reminded everyone who will listen that "Wars can never be won at the expense of civilian populations."

But there is more to this latest chapter of savagery in "the Holy Land."

There is a disturbing lack of clarity about the triggering event of the present crisis: the disappearance of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank in mid-June, and the subsequent discovery of their bodies. They had been shot.

The U.S. journalist Sheera Frankel reported online (via Buzzfeed) that the killings were likely "a crime of opportunity."

Very shortly, however, Netanyahu proclaimed that the murders were the work of a Hamas unit operating in Hebron and that Hamas "would pay a heavy price."

Shortly thereafter, hundreds of Palestinian suspects were arrested in the West Bank, and officer Rosenfeld "walked back" his initial claim. .

But to this day those responsible for the slaying of the three Israeli teenagers have not been brought to justice—and the name of the Palestinian family initially suspected of the crime, a family with a history of "going rogue" in anti-Israeli violence, has never been disclosed.

What we do know for certain is that in a revenge killing a teenage Palestinian boy was soon burned alive in the West Bank.

As to international condemnation of Israel's inhumane excesses, we have this quotation from the late Ariel Sharon: "I don't see that Israel should be tried by the world." Such hubris is blind.

In any case, another ceasefire has now failed, and, as a close observer has put it, "There is no safe place for a mother and father in Gaza."

In Israel there are abundant shelters for the population, not to mention what is arguably the most effective short-range air-defense system ever devised. In Gaza there are buildings designated as UN shelters for civilians that have been struck multiple times by Israeli tank shells and artillery.

And hospitals are overwhelmed, medical supplies running out. The power plant has been struck, and for the majority of the population there is no electricity, no drinking water, the most miserable hygienic conditions imaginable, and pervasive desperation.

And rage.

The oppression of the Palestinian people by the Israelis will be recorded by history as one of the most appalling moral scandals of the 20th and 21st centuries. "The greatest nation on Earth" is complicit in it.